Random Thought: Mass NASA Spaceflight Externships

I just had a crazy thought this morning, that while probably unworkable--we'd probably all be better-off if 99% of government policy proposals were sent directly to the paper-shredder--might be a way to start extricating NASA from it's current manned spaceflight morass.

The following ideas were what led me to this thought:

• With the way our government is structured right now, NASA's primary customer is not the American people, but Congress. And in spite of any high falutin' rhetoric about the common good, the reality is that Congresspeople are people just like the rest of us, and tend to see things from the filter of what benefits them most. In the case of NASA, Congresspeople care most about keeping highly paid aerospace professionals working in their districts (and hopefully therefore voting for them). If the shuttle program employed 6 people in a garage, do you really think there would be anywhere near as much passionate interest in "the gap", and "workforce retention issues"?
  
• That said, Congresspeople do have souls. They actually do care at least on some level that NASA is doing something that sounds plausibly useful--it's just that they want them to be doing that plausibly useful thing while employing thousands of people in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, California, and Utah.
  
• Constellation has a high probability of dieing sometime during this next administration. The only reason why it isn't dead now is that those Congresspeople are worried about having 10,000 unemployed aerospace professionals deciding to vote for their opponent in the next election for not protecting their jobs. But as technical problems, delays, and cost overruns start adding up (along with the realization that Constellation isn't going to be protecting most of those jobs), expect to see the knives come out.
• One of the single biggest costs in any aerospace project is payroll and related overhead. For instance, while I don't have exact numbers (and wouldn't be legally able to give them if I did) and even though MSS doesn't pay anywhere near as much as NASA does, I wouldn't be surprised if 1/2 to 2/3 of our expenditures to-date have been payroll and related overhead. The typical burdened rate for an aerospace engineer is in the $100-200k/year range.
• The idea of the Air Force or NASA running paid "externships" (where an employee or contractor of theirs works with some specific company, with NASA or the Air Force paying their salary in exchange for benefiting from the cross-pollination of ideas) has been gaining traction lately.
  

So, what if we cranked this idea to 11? What if instead of trying to make another multi-billion dollar shuttle-flavored boondoggle, Congress instead directed NASA to offer most of its shuttle workforce as "externs" for industry? Armadillo Aerospace and several of the smaller alt.space companies have demonstrated how much more you can get for a given amount of money if you don't have to pay your employees. Imagine if, phasing in over a period of a few years, all of the sudden it was possible to get skilled aerospace technicians and engineers, and not have to pay the full burdened cost yourself?

The benefit for Congress would be that those aerospace engineers would still be being employed, but they'd be working on projects that were actually being run more by market-driven companies, and not as much by the whims of an ossified bureaucracy. The goal would be to use this as a way to help promote aerospace development in those aerospace states. The same money would be spent, the same jobs would be protected, but the effort expended would be more aligned with what the market actually determines to be useful. With the availability of much cheaper labor, it would become much easier and cheaper to launch an aerospace startup than it currently is.

The benefit for the rest of us, is that as those former shuttle employees are divided up among a larger number of commercial enterprises, the incentive structure for the Congresspeople will shift more towards promoting the growth of a strong industry, as opposed to running centrally-planned megaprojects. Also, it might be possible to structure the program such that the externs gradually transfer from NASA payrolls to those companies over the course of a few years, freeing up that money for NASA to act more as a customer while also at the same time possibly allowing NASA to be more able to survive the coming fiscal environment. For instance, for the first year or two of the program, maybe NASA is paying for most or all of the salary of a given extern, but after that each year the company has to pick up another 20% of the tab until at some point the extern is no longer a government contractor but a commercial employee.

Now, even if this policy isn't entirely nuts, the incentives structure will matter a lot. First off, you don't want to make greybeards so cheap that nobody will hire new college students. One way of doing this would be to require a given company to hire at least one fresh college grad for every extern they get. Also, as some of those externs start retiring, some of the money that was going to their salary could instead be transfered to matching funds for hiring fresh college students. Second off, you don't want companies using this as a way to lay off their existing workforce and just mooch off of the state. So you setup some rule that as they lay their own people off, they little by little lose access to those externs. I'm not sure how exactly you would determine who is eligible for externs. Maybe some sort of lottery or draft like they do with many professional sports? I'm not sure.

Anyhow, it's a crazy idea, but I bet you if you took those 10,000 NASA employees, and instead had them working on commercial projects that it would close the gap a lot faster than pouring more money down the Ares-I rathole. Of course, interfering with the market always causes unintended consequences, the only question is would the end result be better or worse than the current status quo.

What do y'all think?

[Update: 11:37am]

One piece of feedback I got back offline was that this idea would look too much like a direct subsidy to ever work. Well, ignoring the fact that congress just passed one of the most pork-o-licious farm subsidy bills ever, I think there are some ways to deal with this concern. I think one way to frame this is as a "privitization" of the NASA manned space transportation industry. In all the debates about workforce retention, NASA and Congress continuously refer to these employees as "national assets". Well, if they're national assets, why not transition them over a few years from a 100% government owned and operated asset to one that is mostly commercially owned and operated? Just a thought.

The other thougt would be making sure that all aerospace (and even some non-aerospace) companies have equal access to benefiting from this externship pool. Ie, anyone can become involved, that way it isn't benefiting one specific aerospace company at the expense of all the others.

A Point Worth Repeating

Over on Jeff's SpacePolitics site, there is a discussion going on right now about a recent poll on the relevance of space. While much of the discussion was interesting as usual, I particularly liked the point made by a fellow 20-something by the name of James:

Those who support the current lunar program often forget the opportunity costs. There are better ways to spend the same money on developing space. I’m 24 - with the current Constellation program plan, I’ll be in my mid 30s by the time we get back to the moon. If we operate the system for a decade or two after that, as is likely, all I can expect in my career is to see 4 people land on the moon twice a year. That is not exciting - nor is it worth the money. Maybe by the time I retire we’ll be looking at another “next generation system”.

What’s the point of any of this for someone my age?

Two of the replies to his question more or less missed what I saw as the key point, and instead mostly fixated on the question at the end--taking it as a sign of greed, self-centeredness, shortsightedness, etc. Personally, I don't think for a second that James was being whiny or impatient or ADD (as our generation is often accused of). I think he's asking a very valid and timely question.

While I know it's somewhat vain to quote oneself, I think the point I made there bears repeating:

If our current approach to space development was actually putting in place the technology and infrastructure needed to make our civilization a spacefaring one, I’d be a lot more willing to support it. Wise investments in the future are a good thing, but NASA’s current approach is not a wise investment in the future. It’s aging hipsters trying to relive the glory days of their youth at my generation’s expense.

Patience is only a virtue when you’re headed in the right direction and doing the right thing. If Constellation was truly (as Marburger put it) making future operations cheaper, safer, and more capable, then I’d be all for patiently seeing it out.

While Constellation might possibly put some people on the moon, it won’t actually put us any closer to routine, affordable, and sustainable exploration and development. I have no problem with a long hard road, just so long as its the right one.

As I discussed in my previous post on John Marburger's speech, I discussed this important point. It's not good enough for NASA to just be doing stuff in space. Sending people to the Moon in a way that doesn't "reduce the cost or risk of future operations" isn't a very responsible way of spending tax dollars that are going to be paid in large part by James and my generation.

Additional Thoughts on the SA'08 Propellant Depot Panel

It's been long enough since I put up the presentations from the panel, that I figured it would be worth starting a new post to mention some of my thoughts on what we discussed on the panel. Some of these ideas are thoughts that were briefly discussed during the panel, and others are ideas I just didn't have time to bring up.

While the panel went much better than expected, I also noticed several things I could do next time to make it even better.

One thing is that I probably should have mixed audience participation, discussion, and presentation a little more thoroughly. Expecting people to stay awake through an hour of presentations right after dinner was a bit much--surprisingly enough most of the attendees did, but I think mixing it up would've been better.

Another thing that in hind-sight would've been useful is to set aside more time in the panel for actual discussion, particularly on points where one or more of us had a different preferred approach than the others. For the most part we all agreed on the importance of propellant depots, the benefits to commercial and governmental programs, and the fact that a lot of the technology either exists, or is on the cusp of existing. But we disagreed on some of the details, and much like statistics, it's the disagreement or outliers (and the reasoning behind them) that hold the most information.

Tugs or Reusable Tankers or Both

One point of disagreement was between myself and Dallas Bienhoff regarding the best way for handling prox-ops for propellant deliveries. I am a big proponent of using space tugs to offload as much of the weight and complexity of a prox-ops system to an asset that stays on-orbit and gets used a bunch of times. Dallas on the other hand disagreed with me on that point and suggested that a reusable tanker with autonomous rendezvous and docking capabilities was a better way to handle complexity and reduce cost. Both of us were advocating for reusing as much of the complicated prox-ops hardware as possible, but going about it in different ways.

To me, there are several benefit of having the tanks dumb as possible, with all of the complicated subsystems on the tug:

• Performance: the tug stays in orbit, and is very weight insensitive. By not having to relaunch the tug every time, you get a lot more propellant per pound of delivered mass on orbit. When you look at unmanned delivery craft right now, they typically have a really poor payload to drymass ratio. For a tug you want as high of a payload to drymass ratio as possible.
• Easier Open Interface Standards: It is probably a lot easier to get ITAR approval for openly publishing a very simple common interface specification if that interface spec is just a few handholds and a commercial, off-the-shelf quick-disconnect receptacle. That way, anyone who can launch stuff into your station's orbit can deliver propellants to your station, even if they're durned furiners. An Autonomous Rendezvous & Docking (AR&D) system with automatic fluid couplings would likely be a lot harder to get export approval for.
• Flexibility: The simpler the propellant module, and the less smarts it has built-in, the easier it is for people to just stretch it to whatever size best suits their launch vehicle. Unlike a reusable tanker which might require significant redesign to be used on a different launch vehicle.
  
• RLV Simplicity: Making a high-flight rate reusable launch vehicle is going to be hard enough already without trying to also make it into a satellite as well. For RLVs, you want a relatively dumb tank that never leaves the payload bay, but you don't want to have to have all the prox-ops stuff cut into your already very limited payload budget.
• Other Tug Uses--On-Orbit Assembly: Tugs are useful for lots of other things too, especially if they have arms. They can help in assembly of stations and large in-space vehicles. No need to make each and every space station or space vehicle component be its own independently operable mini-station complete with its own GN&C, power, etc.
  
• Other Tug Uses--Satellite Recovery: They can also perform satellite recovery missions. Imagine if there had been a tug already developed, and set aside on standby in case of a botched launch like the recent Proton upper stage failure. If done properly, the tug could've been launched on short notice on an otherwise empty upper stage. The tug could've then transfered the satellite from the malfunctioning upper stage to the still functional, and mostly full upper stage that delivered the tug. There are some very tricky technical details I'm glossing over, but its a capability that could become rather standard once you have tugs available. In case anyone from the DoD is reading this, yes, I'm saying that tugs are an important part of ORS.
• Other Tug Uses--Rescue Missions: They can perform rescue missions. Right now, one of the most hazardous parts of a lunar mission is the ascent, rendezvous, and earth return legs. Imagine if there was a staging point in L1, L2, or LUNO, instead of basing all lunar missions from earth's surface. You could store one or two of these tugs at the small staging/refueling base. If something went wrong with the LSAM US or CEV, you could send a tug in to help out. If you were using lunar ejector seats, and had to abort to orbit, this would give you a quick way of getting a rescuer to a stranded astronaut. This would greatly reduce your odds of losing a crew due to a LSAM/CEV rendezvous failure, or CEV propulsion failure prior to (or during) TEI.

And there are probably other ideas I'm overlooking.

On the other hand, Dallas a good point in favor of reusable propellant tankers, and I can think of some others as well:

• The more expensive propellant handling hardware your tanker needs, the better it would be to reuse it. For instance, say you don't think you can get first-orbit or even first-day rendezvous with your propellant depot. You might want to invest more heavily in insulation, zero boil-off systems, and other cryo handling hardware. You don't want to be tossing that away after every flight.
• You're eventually going to want to have smaller depots located on the other ends of your transportation system (ie in the lunar vacinity, around Mars, around Venus, etc). Some of these locations, especially at first, will need to be fueled from Earth. That means tanker modules are necessary. Once again, once the flight duration gets longer than a couple of hours, you're going to start wanting to add other bells and whistles. And those bells and whistles are expensive enough that not throwing them away after every flight is a good idea.

Dallas may have had some other points that I'm not remembering right now, but I think that both sides have valid points, and that the best option may be to do a little bit of both.

Full-Service vs. LOX-Only?

I had been somewhat surprised when Dallas (who works for the company that was the lead on developing and flying Orbital Express) suggested against using a tug. I was even more surprised when Frank Zegler suggested a LOX-only depot. Before I had met Frank over the internet, I considered LH2 to be an unmitigated evil, almost on the level of Nitrogen Tetroxide and UDMH. But he was one of the main people to talk me into thinking that Hydrogen isn't always evil, and sometimes can be tamed, and can make a lot of sense. So, when he sided with the sentiment that meiza and several other regulars here at Selenianboondocks have expressed--namely that your first depot should probably be LOX only--I was very surprised.

I didn't have time to bring up this point of disagreement at all during the panel, but here were some of Frank's points in favor of LOX-only depots:

• LOX is much easier to store and handle cryogenically due to its much higher boiling point.
• LOX is much denser, and thus you can store a lot more of it in a given size tank.
• LOX makes up the majority of the propellant mass than for any fuel combo you would likely use.
• Storing only one liquid is much easier than two, because you can eliminate the heat transfer from the warmer propellant (LOX) into the colder one (LH2). Even with a sunshield or a ton of MLI, you still have a significant heat source in the fact that your LOX is way hotter than the boiling temperature of your LH2. You probably never thought of LOX as a heat source, did you?

If these arguments sound familiar, its because they're the same ones that many of you have made over the years. I can see Frank's point, especially if you think that your main (or only) market is going to be "topping up" EDSes and LSAMs for NASA. I've never disputed these facts. But I still think that going all the way and providing at least one fuel to go with that LOX is a good step. These arguments probably aren't new, and probably aren't going to change anyone's minds, but in case you haven't heard my spiel before here's my case:

• Without modifying existing or future stages, they only have so much hydrogen capacity. Unless you launch a complete stage as your payload, topped-off to the brim, you're going to use some of that capacity getting to orbit in the first place. Which quickly cuts into your maximum payload you can deliver to your final destination (and also how much LOX you can actually use).
• For many payloads, prior to the time when reusable LEO-GEO or LEO-Luna ferries are available, the best way to use a propellant depot is to launch the payload on a refuelable upper stage, top that upper stage up in LEO, and then immediately go to your destination. If you reuse your upper stage as your transfer stage, the inability to top of the hydrogen as well effectively halves your payload you can deliver to other destinations. If you fly a separate refuelable stage that has a full load of LH2, you're greatly cutting into how big of a payload you can put into LEO in the first place. For instance, a Centaur stage with a full load of LH2 weighs about half of the payload capacity of an Atlas V 401 to LEO.
• If you can't provide both oxidizer and fuel, you can't reuse interorbital transfer stages/ferries.
  
• If you can't provide both oxidizer and fuel, you can't reuse lunar landers.
  
• If you can't provide fuel on-orbit, you can't make up for boil-off caused by unexpected delays, variance in the thermal properties and boil-off rate of your stages, equipment malfunctions etc.
• On a psychological level, going LOX-only allows people to continue to disbelieve in the feasibility and utility of propellant depots. Look at the mindset two years ago. It said that propellant transfer of any sort on orbit was deep, black magic, and that it should be avoided at all cost. Now that Orbital Express has shown that it is doable and not that hard for storable propellants, critics say "well, that's all good and fine, but cryogenic propellants are a whole different beast entirely." If we went to LOX-only depots, those same critics would likely say "well we knew LOX was doable all along, it's the hydrogen that's the unrealistic part--there's no way you could store that long enough to be practical." At some point I want to stop giving skeptics ammunition.
• More importantly, both Dallas and Frank agree that LH2 storage on-orbit is completely feasible. Dallas going so far as to say that for 1-2kW and 50-60kg, you could install a ZBO system that could completely eliminate boil-off.

I guess I'm still convinced that in spite of the added extra difficulty, that the real markets that I think there will be for propellants on-orbit will be much better served if you can provide fuel as well as oxidizer. But you can draw your own conclusions.

To ZBO or Not to ZBO?

Another disagreement (this time between Dallas and Frank) was on whether or not to go with a Zero Boil-Off system for long-duration cryo storage. Dallas seemed to think that not only would it not be that hard to implement, but that it would be very desirable, while Frank seemed to prefer passive storage techniques, and in fact considered ZBO to actually be a detriment! I think both sides have points, but that in a way they're somewhat talking past each other. And in the end, I think I side more with Dallas on this one.

Frank is right that ZBO systems, done the typical way, (without doing a proper passive-storage design and without settling propellants) is likely going to be an expensive development project, and a complicated system in operations. Frank also made the point that at least some of the boiled-off hydrogen is actually useful. That warm GH2 can be propulsively vented to cause the other propellants to stay in a settled orientation. It is still pretty cold, so it can be used to pull heat from the avionics away from the propellants. It can be used for prechilling lines and valves. It can be used to provide propellants for GOX/GH2 RCS engines. It can be combined with oxygen in a fuel cell to provide water. The single most important benefit for Frank and ULA is that first one--settling the propellants makes everything easier, and propulsive settling is by far the highest maturity and easiest way of settling propellants.

As Dallas pointed out, a properly designed ZBO system when added on-top of a good passive insulation system doesn't need to be that big and complex. 1-2kW isn't that much power. And especially if the propellant is settled in some fashion, running a cryocooler becomes even easier, because you can avoid two-phase flow. If your cryocooler works better taking gas in and spitting out liquid (or chilled gas), settling allows you to guarantee you're only pulling in gas. If pulling in liquid, subcooling it, and spraying it through the gas is more effective, settling allows you to pull liquid from a part of the tank where you know liquid will be, and to inject it into a part of the tank where you know it will be gas.

Lastly, there are other ways to settle propellants, and if you use them, you no longer need boil-off gases to provide the settling. You might still intentionally allow some LH2 to boil-off, for use in RCS engines for stationkeeping or to run fuel cells. But with a ZBO system, you have a choice.

A more convincing argument against the complexity of a ZBO system, that can be derived from Frank's presentation, is the fact that a good passive system can get boiloff rates low enough that you just don't care about them anymore. In those cases, a ZBO system might not buy you that much extra performance. Now, there's an argument against ZBO that I'm more willing to buy.

So, I guess the real answer may be--it depends. In situations where your propellant is expensive enough to deliver to, where deliveries are somewhat infrequent, and storage times are long, a ZBO system might make a lot of sense. But in situations where the propellant can be readily topped off from tankers on a regular basis, even though ZBO is doable and not that hard, it still might not be worth it.

Once again, draw your own conclusions.

NASA vs Other Markets

This last topic isn't so much a disagreement, as an area that I thought deserved a little more commentary. I think that all of the panelists would agree that NASA is unlikely to have a change of heart tomorrow, and completely overhaul Constellation to take more advantage of propellant depots. However, in spite of this recognition that NASA isn't likely to become a good customer anytime soon, most of the panel was still very NASA- and Constellation-centric. While there were mentions made by all the panelists about performance benefits that normal ELVs could get for delivering payloads to GEO and beyond, most of the discussion of benefits was focused on augmenting NASA's return to the Moon.

Admittedly, if NASA ever gets its act together and actually makes it back to the Moon, it will be annually consuming more propellant mass in orbit than the combined launch mass of all other launches combined, and if they were actually buying that from propellant depots, it would be a truly transformational event. But lets face it guys--it makes too much sense for NASA to willingly go along with it. Much like Zero-G demonstrated, while NASA might eventually be willing to abide by the law and purchase commercial services that they used to provide for themselves in-house, it will take many years to get them to change. As it is, it'll take NASA a decent amount of time before they can even take advantage of depots, even if they recognized the potential right away.

As I said in my presentation, it doesn't matter how critical propellant depots are for creating a spacefaring society, or how much better lunar exploration would be with propellant depots involved. If you can't find a way to get enough real customers to wrap a business case around, it will never happen.

That said, I also wanted to note that NASA and the DoD are actually doing some good things regarding propellant depots. First, they've regularly put out SBIR solicitations for technologies that could be relevant to propellant depots. Second, on the larger scale, they've funded actual technology demonstration missions like Orbital Express, DART, and XSS-11 to demonstrate useful related technologies. Third, even though Michael Griffin's NASA hasn't been doing much action-wise to enable propellant depots, Griffin has at least been a vocal proponent of the capability in many public forums. Fourth, NASA was at least interested in offering a propellant depot related Centennial Challenge--if they had actually been given any new Centennial Challenges funding in the past three years.

Even though I don't think either the DoD or NASA is likely to outright fund a propellant depot anytime soon (and personally I wouldn't want them to!), there are lots of things that can be done within the system to help move things closer to reality. Better, clearer ties can be made between the technologies needed for propellant depots, and the needs and desires of NASA and the DoD. Tugs and depots, for instance, are an important part of a truly Operationally Responsive space transportation infrastructure. By making that connection more and more in public, additional funding for research, development, and demonstration might become available. NASA also desperately needs good long-duration cryo storage and handling technologies in order to make ESAS work, and at least some of those technologies will also be useful for propellant depots. Propellant depots (especially commercial ones) might allow NASA to launch larger interplanetary missions than would otherwise be possible, etc. So while I think the key to propellant depots lies in markets outside of NASA, I think there's a lot of good NASA and the DoD can still due, even in spite of the political environment and constraints that both of them operate in.


Anyhow, those were some of my thoughts I wanted to discuss from the panel. Once I get the video from Henry, I might find a couple changes or additional comments to bring up, but for now those are my thoughts.

Comments?

[Update: 4/4 8:30AM PDT]
Here is the link to a thread on NASASpaceFlight.com where I have been discussing propellant depots with some of the other regulars.

Space Access 2008 Propellant Depot Panel

I'll update this after work with some commentary (and sometime in the next week or two, I'll see if I can upload a video of the session as well). But for now here are the four presentations that were given.

I started out with an introduction to the concept of propellant depots, a short discussion on some of the general technical and business challenges, and then an introduction to the panelists.

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Rand Simberg (of Transterrestrial Musings and also of Wyoming Space and Information Systems) gave a presentation talking about some more of the business and policy issues related to propellant depots.

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Dallas Bienhoff of Boeing discussed the work he's done over the past several years on propellant depots, and he also discussed in more concrete terms some of the advantages (both to ESAS and to commercial operators) of propellant depots.

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The final presentation was given by Frank Zegler, of ULA. He talked about their thoughts on propellant depots, and some related work they've been doing (and will be doing in the near future. Frank had some cool eyecandy for some of the hardware they've been building and testing lately for the new Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage that ULA is working on.

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Marburger's Speech

There's been a lot of discussion over the past few days about OSTP Director John Marburger's speech at the recent Goddard Memorial Symposium, but there were a couple of good points that I felt deserved repetition, and I also had a few thoughts I would like to add.

One of the memes that John started two years ago is the concept of extending our nation's economic sphere throughout the Solar System. Early on in his speech, referring to the thriving commercial satellite market, John states that "Humanity has succeeded in incorporating Low and Geostationary Earth orbit in its economic sphere." While I think he's basically right, I'd just point out that LEO and GEO are still only on the fringes of our economic sphere. While there are a couple of (very large and profitable) niches that have been exploited in spite of the immature state of existing earth-to-orbit transportation systems, none of these markets really have succeeded in catalyzing further demand for other services in LEO and GEO. While lots of money is being made, and lots of useful services are being provided, we still have a long way to go before I'd really state that LEO and GEO are firmly within mankind's "economic sphere".

The most important idea from this speech is found in the next paragraph:

If we are serious about this, then our objective must be more than a disconnected series of missions, each conducted at huge expense and risk, and none building a lasting infrastructure to reduce the expense and risk of future operations. If we are serious, we will build capability, not just on the ground but in space. And our objective must be to make the use of space for human purposes a routine function.

He amplified this point a few paragraphs later:

Exploration that is not in support of something else strikes me as somehow selfish and unsatisfying, and not consistent with the fact that we are using public funds for this enterprise, no matter how small a fraction of the total budget they may be.

If the architecture of the exploration phase is not crafted with sustainability in mind, we will look back on a century or more of huge expenditures with nothing more to show for them than a litter of ritual monuments scattered across the planets and their moons.

I think that though this may not have been his intention, these quotes highlight most of my current frustration with NASA's current approach to executing the Vision for Space Exploration. Having NASA develop its Constellation architecture means that 20 years from now, it will be just as hard for a commercial entity to get to the moon as it would be if Constellation was cancelled tomorrow. Nothing that is being done "reduces the risk or expense of future operations" or "makes the use of space for human purposes a routine function." I'm glad that at least someone is trying to tie this all back to actual benefit to the nation. I'm also glad that John pointed out that the whole "NASA only spends less than 1% of the federal budget" line does not give NASA carte blanche to spend that money however it darned well pleases. That money is supposed to be spent in a way that furthers the national interest, preferably in a way that makes space more accessible for everyone.

Now, NASA isn't completely neglecting its responsibility to help reduce the risk and expense of future commercial, defense, and NASA operations. They are doing such things as COTS and Centennial Challenges. And people in power seem to be finally wising-up to the idea that COTS is the only real hope for reducing the gap, and the only way to economically services the ISS once the Shuttle is finally retired. But I do think that it's a big negative mark that the vast majority of the money NASA will spend over the next decade on Constellation has nothing to do with making the moon easier for everyone to access in the future.

There's been talk from NASA and some of their less discerning fanboys of a "Lunar COTS". Basically the idea is to waste $100-120B on using Constellation to setup a small ISS on the Moon, and then once its there start paying commercial entities to service said base. This creates an interesting situation. Since NASA won't have done anything for over a decade to help make it easier for commercial entities to actually service the moon, they'll either have to keep sustaining the base themselves while they spend the money to belatedly help develop that commercial capability. Or, if the commercial market has independently created that capability anyhow, that NASA base will likely be only a small niche market in the cislunar space. The smart thing to do would be to start finding ways to develop or promote those commercial capabilities from the start. Things like funding research or sponsoring prizes for fielding the technologies needed for propellant depots. Acting as a customer for commercial services especially on-orbit propellants. Acting as a better customer for commercially attained lunar environmental data. Finding ways to promote translunar tourism and eventually lunar orbital (or Lagrange point) stations. Finding ways consistent with federal laws to act as an anchor tenant, to champion these new technologies, to fund demonstrator missions, and even to put money aside in escrow for being a leading customer for these new capabilities.

For a short duration before Griffin got in as NASA's administrator, NASA was actually acting in a way to more fully fulfill mandate to "promote commercial as well as international participation "to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests." Under the guidance of O'keefe and Steidle, NASA setup several billion dollars worth of "Human and Robotic Technologies" research to help develop and field the technologies that would allow it to more effectively achieve its exploration goals. It was set to operate its exploration architecture in a way to leverage to the maximum extent possible existing and future commercial capabilities. To act as though NASA can't do that is to ignore the fact that that was its very plan up until Griffin took the reins.

I guess the question boils down to what Marburger said: do we intend to extend humanity's economic sphere of influence to include the rest of the Solar System?

Next Generation Exploration Conference 2 (Part I)

Apparently unbeknownst to most people in the space blogosphere, there was a second space related conference going on in Silicon Valley this past week (at about the same time). This conference, the second "Next Generation Exploration Conference" was an invitation-only conference for young, "emerging global space leaders" put on by NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate's "Commercial Development Policy" group (now headed by Ken Davidian), and by NASA's Innovative Partnership Program. The focus of the working conference was commercial opportunities in cislunar space, and our goal was to put together a document overviewing some of the commercial opportunities in cislunar space, fleshing out some detail on the nearest term and most feasible of those opportunities, and making suggestions to NASA (and industry/academia) on what could be done to help enable those opportunities.

It was a lot of fun. I missed the first day (due to an important meeting we had down in Mojave on Monday and Tuesday) of the conference, but was able to make it there in time for the start of the working groups.

I was worried at first that with the sponsor being ESMD, and with the "alt.VSE" conference going on across town at Stanford at the same time, that there would be lots of pressure to turn the conference in a NASA-centric direction. In the preplanning discussions, I got chastised by one of the other attendees for suggesting that the Constellation architecture and Global Exploration Strategy didn't serve as much of a "point of departure" for the working groups, since it was pretty much irrelevant to commercial lunar development. I was worried that the desire to toe the NASA line would end up turning the conference into a brainstorming session for NASA-serving lunar businesses that 20 years from now might be feasible if NASA happens to get its architecture built and lunar base started.

Fortunately, Ken was able to find a way to focus the conference that was much more productive without degenerating into Ares-bashing, which I tend to be frequently guilty of. First, he made an important distinction between "commercialization" and "commercial development". I wasn't at the conference on the day he explained this concept, but as I understand it, "commercialization" is more or less taking some NASA-provided function, and contracting it out to the private sector. This could be things like "commercial" ISS resupply, where NASA is having the private sector serve it in a more cost effective manner than it could do on its own. "Commercial development" on the other hand is when a commercial actor creates a good or service to meet the needs of various groups, among which NASA may or may not be one of them. For instance, if a company were to develop a crew/cargo transport vehicle for servicing Bigelow stations as well as the ISS, that might be more of a commercial development. His point was that while commercialization was good, true commercial development was better. The other thing Ken did was to suggest focusing primarily on near-term projects taking the current status quo as the point of departure.

Anyhow, with that focus, we split up into working groups. I joined the "Lunar Access" working group, which consisted of several NASA employees (including several people from the COTS program), several university students, and a couple of people from "Big" aerospace, and one or two other representatives of the entrepreneurial space access community (including the guy at SpaceX who is in charge of most of their lunar business development).

We started out by looking at the long-term of what kind of commercial ecosystem we'd like to see in cislunar space over the next few decades, and then focusing back on transportation segments and business opportunities that were either feasible now, or that needed to be started in the near term. The big conclusion we came to was that the transportation needs of commercial lunar ventures (frequent access, low marginal cost, etc) did not line up very well with the planned Constellation architecture, and that therefore commercial lunar transportation would be important for a lunar ventures. We weren't necessarily suggesting abandoning Constellation, just stating that for non-governmental ventures, other transportation options needed to be available. So as I said, we worked back to the near-term to figure out what steps would need to (and could be) taken in the near term, and spent most of our time fleshing out the ideas that we came up with. I'll probably go into more detail in further blog posts, but the seven opportunities we found most interesting were:

• Developing off-the-shelf Automated Rendezvous and Docking systems
• Space Tugs
• Space Ferries (I'll go into the distinction between these two in another post)
• Propellant Depots
• Standardized Lunar Microlander Buses
• Testbeds for proving out technologies on orbit
• An ESPA-ring derived secondary payload system for lunar payloads
  

I was mostly involved in the second, third, and fourth ideas. So, we fleshed each of these ideas out, including putting some thoughts down into who could use these services, who might be actors in supplying or helping develop these services, what things NASA or industry could do to enable these opportunities, and what sort of time frame these things would likely occur in. It probably would help if next time they do this, they involve more business people, particularly among the mentoring/moderating staff (most of the people in my group were engineers). I imagine it shouldn't be too hard to find angel investors, VC managers, and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are interested enough in space, and interested enough in working with young people to help provide a more thorough business analysis. But, as it is, the results we were able to put together were at least rather informative. Once the finalized document we produced is ready, I'll post a link to it so you all can see more of what we came up with.

LM/Bigelow Atlas V Deal

For those who didn't see it on Hobbyspace, I got interviewed yesterday by New Scientist about the recent LM/Bigelow announcement. All in all it was a pretty good article (though apparently we might need to update our website to reflect the fact that we haven't been in Santa Clara for over a year and a half...). I had a few other thoughts about the announcement that I figured might be worth sharing, for what its worth.

In the quote they selected for the article, they mentioned my question of "will they be able to drum up enough demand to justify the flight rates they're talking about." Here were some of my thoughts that I shared with David Riga (the author of the New Scientist piece), that didn't make the cut:

If he were just running an orbital hotel (he isn't), I'd be very skeptical. Instead I'm somewhere between skeptical and guardedly optimistic. While there haven't been large numbers of takers for flights on the Soyuz, what Bigelow's offering is fundamentally different. Flight opportunities are frequent (which is critical for most microgravity research programs--imagine trying to run an R&D lab that you could only visit once or twice a year!), the situation is more customer friendly, training would likely be more streamlined (I hear that for Soyuz training the "passenger" is actually more of a third crew member than an honest-to-goodness passenger), etc.

It'll be interesting to see if he can pull off his idea of forming an international astronaut corps for countries that don't have their own space program. It wouldn't have all the usual glory of having your own national launch system, but it also wouldn't have the waste of it either. Countries like the UK could look at it as a smart and low-cost way of doing a manned space program--why reinvent the wheel when you can just buy a ticket and focus on doing something in space instead of blowing billions just getting there?

Also, the title of the New Scientist piece is somewhat misleading (though David may not have had anything to do with the title). There are some major hurdles for using Atlas V to fly people to Bigelow's station--it's just that most of the major risks don't lie with "man-rating" the Atlas V (or whatever you want to call making reasonable adaptations for flying a capsule on an ELV). Continuing with some more thoughts that didn't make the cut (yeah I wasn't expecting David to use every word of my several page response...):

Most of the challenges fall into two areas: developing a market at the pricepoint Bigelow can offer with existing transportation systems (like a "man rated" Atlas V), and finding a capsule developer who can raise the money and technically execute on doing such a capsule. I think the technical risk for both parts is relatively low--this has been done before even if there are still some improvements needed over previous systems (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz, etc) to make it commercially viable. Most of the risk is on the marketing and financing side of things.

If Bigelow is able to start signing up high-visibility customers though, look to see that change. Once there looks like there's going to be enough demand to justify a capsule project, I think it'll be much easier to raise money for [developing] it.

Lastly, discussing whether I thought that the Atlas V was a good choice for Bigelow, I said:

I think at the moment they're a pretty good choice. The good news is that with SpaceX also hopefully getting into the launch business soon, that'll provide the competition Bigelow needs to keep prices low. Obviously, it would be great if there were high-flight-rate commercial RLVs instead, but those really need a proven market in order to justify the funds needed to pull them off. So short term, I think this may be Bigelow's best bet. In the longer term, it'll be up to LM to find ways
to keep themselves competitive.

To elaborate on this last point a bit, the price points Bigelow has been talking about (~$15M per person for a 1 month stay) and which a system based off of the existing Atlas V could likely deliver are probably too high for there to be a lot of space tourism demand. Fortunately, as Bigelow has mentioned a lot of times, he isn't running a space hotel. In order to really start getting to the elastic portion of the demand curve, the price tag would probably need to be a bit lower--on the order of $2-5M per ticket (according to some reanalysis of the old Futron Space Tourism study that T/Space did a few years ago that I discussed in this old blog post). It may not actually be as impossible for LM to deliver numbers at least on the high-end of that scale as I used to think (they have some possible tricks up their sleeve if the demand for Atlas V flights was high enough to justify the investment), and if Bigelow can actually deliver on demand for 80+ people to his station in a given year it might also be enough to close the business case for a high-flight rate, small RLV. But neither of those options are likely to happen right away. So, while someone like Space Adventures could probably rent some of his facility for space tourists, at the price point they are talking about, I'd be surprised if they could fill up more than 1-2 of the 12 targeted flights per year with actual "space tourists".

That leaves Bigelow's "sovereign" and "prime" customers to make up the rest of the 10 flights worth of demand. Admittedly one should note that not all of the 12 flights per year are going to be people--I'd imagine that at least one will be consumables, cargo, reboost propellants, etc. And on some flights I imagine that some of the passenger seats might be exchanged for experiments, research hardware/raw materials, and other commercial cargo.

The good news is that if they're really providing 12 missions per year, that's a monthly flight. While that still isn't phenomenally great for a microgravity research program (see Ken's last post, and my last space post and these posts from the ACES conference two years back for why flight rate is important for such programs), it's substantially better than the existing state of practice. As was stated in the first of those two ACES posts, when people know that there's going to be a flight every month to the station, it's a lot easier to slip last minute experiments or small hardware on-board at the last minute. Scientific research often lives or dies on iterations--on how fast you can experiment, analyze, reformulate, rehypothesize, and get to your next experimental step. What this means is that while 12 flights a year at $15M per seat isn't perfect for orbital microgravity research, it might actually be good enough to start generating some real demand--ie the "tipping point" where orbital microgravity demand starts picking up might be a little higher than orbital tourism, and possibly high enough to fill up at least a chunk of those 10 remaining flights.

But like the space tourism demand, that demand is only going to be able to grow if Bigelow can provide enough demand for the rest of those flights. Which brings us back to the "sovereign" customers that Bigelow has mentioned on several occasions. The idea being that this would provide smaller countries a much cheaper way to get involved in manned space flight. At least one country I know of might be in an ideal position to take the lead on this venture: the UK.

As Duncan over at the Rocketeer blog has mentioned on several occasions, this might be a good way for the UK to get back into manned spaceflight as they have recently been discussing more seriously. It's interesting to note that the premier suborbital tourism venture involves a US launch provider and a British operator, so the idea of the UK buying tickets to a US owned commercial station on US owned and operated launch vehicles could be framed as being the new way of doing things. As I mentioned above, by letting someone else spend the money on the destination and the transportation, the UK could focus on actually doing something useful with people in space, instead of blowing so much money on the first two categories that they have little left for actually accomplishing something. This would be a very forward-thinking thing for the UK to do. And if they took the lead in signing up for such a program, it is very feasible to believe that you would see other nations following their lead. I'm thinking of other Anglosphere countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and possibly even India. It wouldn't take too many of them running small low-cost astronaut corps and doing their own research projects on Bigelow stations before you could start providing enough demand to see those kinds of flight rates. Or at least it doesn't seem to unrealistic to imagine it.

So, at least on the surface it might be possible for Bigelow to pull this off--but he's going to need to sign up some high profile customers sooner rather than later. In the medium and long term, if Bigelow is able to provide enough demand for that many Atlas V flights, LM is going to have a lot of competition. From SpaceX and from other corners. But that's a problem that I'm sure we would all love to have...

Discussion of Dr. Griffin's STA Comments on ESAS

I've had several people in several places ask me if I was going to do a point-by-point rebuttal of Mike Griffin's comments to the STA this week (for reference the text of his comments is available here). While I don't have the time to go into every single disagreement I have with what he said, I think there are a couple of key points I would like to point out. In other words, I've come to discuss Griffin, not to Fisk him.

Missing the Vision

Dr Griffin starts his defense of the chosen Constellation architecture by framing it "in the
context of policy and law that dictate NASA’s missions." As he said on page 2:

Any system architecture must be evaluated first against the tasks which it is
supposed to accomplish. Only afterwards can we consider whether it accomplishes
them efficiently, or presents other advantages which distinguish it from competing
choices.

He then went on to discuss President Bush's original announcement of the Vision for Space Exploration, and the NASA Authorization Act of 2005. I agree that it is important to make sure you know up-front what yardstick your program is going to be measured by. However, I think one thing becomes quickly obvious as you read Dr Griffin's quotes from those documents--he entirely focuses on the technical implementation details, and never once mentions the actual policy goals!

Quoting from "A Renewed Spirit of Discovery: The President’s Vision for U.S. Space Exploration":

Goal and Objectives
The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program.

These goals are the yardstick by which any VSE implementation needs to be judged. The rest of the technical details of how the space exploration program is carried out needs to be viewed in the light of these three areas of US interests. It doesn't matter if a proposed implementation hits all of the other technical details, if it doesn't really further US scientific, security, and economic interests, it isn't really compliant with the goals of the president's Vision.

Going into a little more detail on these goals, the Renewed Spirit of Discovery document continues (emphasis mine):

In support of this goal, the United States will:
• Implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond;
• Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations;
• Develop the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration; and
• Promote international and commercial participation in exploration to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests.

Once again, all of the specific technical details like the CEV, retiring Shuttle in 2010, etc. are all pursuant to these goals.

Lastly, the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 (available here) states, once again with my emphasis:

The Administrator shall establish a program to develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, including a robust precursor program, to promote exploration, science, commerce, and United States preeminence in space, and as a stepping-stone to future exploration of Mars and other destinations.

Once again, you will notice that the key goals of this Vision, elucidated by both the President and Congress include not only science, but commerce, and in the president's case security.

I could go on about how Dr Griffin's focus on the parts of the Authorization Act that talk about heavy lift and shuttle derived ignored other sections in the act that talk about "encouraging the commercial use and development of space to the greatest extent practicable" (see Section 101.a.2. parts B-C). But I think the fundamental issue is that by focusing exclusively on just the technical side of the requirements, and not on the underlying goals, Griffin is missing the Vision.

Growth Potential

On page 7, Dr. Griffin starts making his case for the Constellation architecture with this somewhat ironic statement about the Space Shuttle:

Once before, an earlier generation of U.S. policymakers approved a spaceflight architecture intended to optimize access to LEO. It was expected – or maybe “hoped” is the better word – that, with this capability in hand, the tools to resume deep space exploration would follow. It didn’t happen, and with the funding which has been allocated to the U.S. civil space program since the late 1960s, it cannot happen. Even though from an engineering perspective it would be highly desirable to have transportation systems separately optimized for LEO and deep space, NASA’s budget will not support it. We get one system; it must be capable of serving in multiple roles, and it must be designed for the more difficult of those roles from the outset.

And then Dr Griffin goes on to try and justify an architecture based on building a duplicative LEO capable only launch vehicle first, and hoping that when that vehicle is finally done, that there will be funding for developing "the tools to resume deep space exploration"...

After that auspicious start, Dr. Griffin then reminds us that "the new system will and should be in use for many decades." Of course some of the historical analogies he draws could lead one to different solutions than it led him. For instance, he mentions that "In space, derivatives of Atlas and Delta and Soyuz are flying a half-century and more after their initial development." An interesting thing to note about Atlas and Delta is that the only reason why vehicles with the name Atlas and Delta are "still flying" a half-century after their initial development, is precisely because they are only derivatives of the original. In fact, the current EELVs have very little in common with the vehicles that originally bore their names.

On pages 8 and 9, Dr. Griffin concludes that (emphasis mine):

The implications of this are profound. We are designing today the systems that our grandchildren will use as building blocks, not just for lunar return, but for missions to Mars, to the near-Earth asteroids, to service great observatories at Sun-Earth L1, and for other purposes we have not yet even considered. We need a system with inherent capability for growth.

While I disagree with the direction Dr. Griffin is going, I do agree with his point in that last sentence. We do need a transportation architecture that has inherent capability for growth. I just don't think that the Constellation architecture really fits that bill.

The Promise of Commercial Space

Now, lest you think I'm going to spend yet another post hammering on Dr. Griffin, I'd like to quote a part of his speech that I really agreed with:

Further application of common sense also requires us to acknowledge that now is the time, this is the juncture, and we are the people to make provisions for the contributions of the commercial space sector to our nation’s overall space enterprise. The development and exploitation of space has, so far, been accomplished in a fashion that can be described as “all government, all the time”. That’s not the way the American frontier was developed, it’s not the way this nation developed aviation, it’s not the way the rest of our economy works, and it ought not to be good enough for space, either. So, proactively and as a matter of deliberate policy, we need to make provisions for the first step on the stairway to space to be occupied by commercial entrepreneurs – whether they reside in big companies or small ones.

I have to say that for all my disagreements with Griffin, he at least talks a good talk when it comes to commercial space. I full-heartedly agree with his point in this paragraph. When you think about it, even assuming everything works out according to his plan, Constellation is never going to be capable of supporting more than a dozen people off-planet at any time. While that may be a lot more than we have now, Ed Wright has a point when he says that that is a round-off error, not an exploration program. Basically, the only way we're going to see large numbers of people off planet, and the only way we're going to see the large-scale manned exploration and settlement of our solar system in our life times, is if the private sector can eventually play a much more expansive role in space transportation. As it is right now, so long as the commercial industry continues to play second fiddle to parochial interests and NASA-centricism, we're not really going to go much of anywhere.

So, the fact that NASA is at least doing something to help promote that day is a sign that they at least partially get it. A successful and thriving entrepreneurial space transportation industry is going to help them actually achieve their goal of extending human life throughout the solar system in a robust program of space exploration.

Griffin continues with more good comments in his next paragraph:

If designed for the Moon, the use of the CEV in LEO will inevitably be more expensive than a system designed for the much easier requirement of LEO access and no more. This lesser requirement is one that, in my judgment, can be met today by a bold commercial developer, operating without the close oversight of the U.S. government, with the goal of offering transportation for cargo and crew to LEO on a fee-for-service basis.

But here is where the conversation takes a dangerous turn:

Now again, common sense dictates that we cannot hold the ISS hostage to fortune; we cannot gamble the fate of a multi-tens-of-billions-of-dollar facility on the success of a commercial operation, so the CEV must be able to operate efficiently in LEO if necessary. But we can create a clear financial incentive for commercial success, based on the financial disincentive of using government transportation to LEO at what will be an inherently higher price.

To this end, as I have noted many times, we must be willing to defer the use of government systems in favor of commercial services, as and when they reach maturity. When commercial capability comes on line, we will reduce the level of our own LEO operations with Ares/Orion to that which is minimally necessary to preserve capability, and to qualify the system for lunar flight.

While I agree that the government not only is the government being "willing to defer in favor of commercial services" is a really good idea, I think that this approach (of hedging their bets by coming up with a competing in-house launcher) is fraught with risk. Also, while on first blush, it may appear to be common sense to not "hold the ISS hostage to fortune", it is my contention that this line of reasoning not only doesn't hold as much water as it seems.

First off, as has been pointed out on numerous occasions, including in Griffin's statements above, a commercial solution to ISS crew/cargo is going to be a lot more affordable than the in-house Ares-1/Orion solution. It has been mentioned before by people high up at NASA, that they really need COTS to succeed, because if they have to fly all the ISS missions themselves (especially if ISS doesn't get retired in 2016, which Dr. Griffin mentioned in this speech as a possibility), there really won't be anywhere near enough money to develop the lunar portions of the proposed Constellation architecture in time for the 2020 lunar return goal. You could say in a way that the existing Constellation architecture holds the rest of the Vision hostage to the fortune of COTS. If COTS doesn't succeed, there's no way NASA is going to be able to afford executing on the rest of the vision. If the supposed "backup plan" for ISS resupply won't produce acceptable results anyway if COTS doesn't turn out, NASA shouldn't be trying to make it a backup plan at all--they should invest more heavily in making sure that there are multiple COTS competitors and that they have enough resources to succeed. One of the single biggest execution risks for any COTS company is financing risks. And having a NASA "backup plan" that could potentially compete with them is one of the single biggest obstacles to be overcome in raising money for a COTS team.

Which brings me to my other concern. The danger of having NASA in-house launch vehicles and space access capabilities that can serve as a backup to COTS also allows them to directly compete with COTS if the budgetary situation goes sour. Think about it. If Ares-1 finally gets built and working, but Ares-V doesn't get funded, there's nothing for Ares-1 to do but service ISS. With how hard the esteemed congressmen from Florida, Utah, and Alabama are fighting to maintain the Shuttle workforce and infrastructure (even to the point of suggesting continuing to fly the Shuttle!), does anyone really think that they would just "stand down" at that point, even if there was a clearly superior commercial alternative? Not very likely. I'm sure they would come up with some technical reason why Ares-I was superior (after all, our probabilistic risk assessment says that Ares-I has a 1:2106.5923 chance of killing a crew, while our numbers show that they have a 1:500 chance--who do you want flying our brave astronauts?) and find a way to not actually stand down. The frustrating thing is that by setting things up the way NASA is doing, the NASA people don't even have to be malicious for such a result to happen--it's a natural and likely consequence of the perverse incentives that NASA and Congress are setting up.

So, while I personally think that Dr. Griffin really and emphatically believes in and supports commercial space development, I'm afraid that there's a high chance that some of his well-intended choices could end up coming back to haunt us.

Moon, MARS!!!! and Beyond

The last item I'd like to point out in Dr. Griffin's speech is one of the justifications he used for the "1.5 launch" architecture they selected. Dr. Griffin made the point that while he feels that Constellation needs to be backward compatible with ISS as a backup plan, it also needs to be forward compatible with Mars, because sometime in the 2030s, we're going to be going there. Now, I'm of the opinion that trying to guess what the best technical approach will be for a problem 30 years from now is somewhat of a fools errand. But that's just me I guess.

So, starting on page 16 he begins to layout his case:

On the other end of the scale, we must judge any proposed architecture against the requirements for Mars. We aren’t going there now, but one day we will, and it will be within the expected operating lifetime of the system we are designing today. We know already that, when we go, we are going to need a Mars ship with a LEO mass equivalent of about a million pounds, give or take a bit. I’m trying for one-significant-digit accuracy here, but think “Space Station”, in terms of mass.

Now, I'm not going to go into the fact that there are probably plenty of other approaches to Mars exploration that can change the equation entirely. That's a post for another day. For now, let's just run with that premise.

He then repeats the "everyone knows that ISS taught us that using 20 ton vehicles to build something big is a bad idea" catechism, but that's not what I'd like to discuss. The real gem is in this paragraph on page 17 (emphasis mine):

But if we split the EOR lunar architecture into two equal but smaller vehicles, we will need ten or more launches to obtain the same Mars-bound payload in LEO, and that is without assuming any loss of packaging efficiency for the launch of smaller payloads. When we consider that maybe half the Mars mission mass in LEO is liquid hydrogen, and if we understand that the control of hydrogen boiloff in space is one of the key limiting technologies for deep space exploration, the need to conduct fewer rather than more launches to LEO for early Mars missions becomes glaringly apparent.

It is true that one can draw that inference--that hydrogen boiloff means you should build as big of an HLV as possible. However, the conclusion I would draw is that if cryogenic propellant storage technologies are "key limiting technologies for deep space explortion", then the right answer is to stop trying to kludge around the problem--develop them! Don't use the existing state of the art in propellant handling and problems that are still 20 years down the road drive multi-billion dollar development projects today.

There are current technologies under development that could yield very low to zero boiloff of cryogenic propellants. There are multiple groups (ULA, Boeing, groups working with Glenn Research Center, etc.) pursuing multiple approaches to solving these problems. There are passive cooling and active cooling techniques. This isn't some high-risk technology like nuclear fusion. The technologies needed for cryogenic fluid management in space are mostly low-risk extensions of 40 years worth of research and development. More to the point, many if not all of these technologies need to be developed to make Constellation work for lunar trips anyway, and would still be needed for Mars trips.

Is 2030 really so close that we can't afford to do this right and actually develop the technologies we need instead of trying to kludge by with existing technologies?

Once you have the boiloff issue reduced or solved, that ~500klb of hydrogen ceases to be a headache, and begins to be an opportunity. That's a lot of demand for propellant in orbit, and it can be supplied commercially. You're already going to need propellant transfer technologies anyway if you have to launch the hydrogen in multiple launches, so what's to stop launching it in even smaller launches?

I guess my point is that if one of the key arguments for the 1.5 launch architecture over a more commercial one, or a less expensive shuttle derived one like DIRECT is hydrogen boiloff, I think their kludge around the issue isn't the right approach, and that they'd be better off just doing it the right way. Also, part of the reason why we have a federally funded aerospace program is to help prove out the technologies necessary for enabling the commercial exploitation of space, and actually solving problems like these would be much a much more responsible use of public funds than developing a kludge around point design like Ares V that doesn't advance the state of the art for the commercial benefit of the country.

Conclusions

I guess overall while there were some good points, there was also a lot of issues with Dr. Griffin's latest defense of Constellation. As discussed, I think that an a myopic focus on the technical details while ignoring the overall goals of the VSE has led to an architecture that isn't responsive to the key policy goals laid out by the president and reiterated by Congress (particularly with respect to promoting the commercial and security interests of the United States). I think that in spite of Griffin recognizing the need for growth and flexibility in any architecture, that he chose a rather brittle and inflexible one. I also think that while he showed that he does recognize the potential of commercial space, and the importance of NASA trying to promote it, I think that the way he's running COTS and Constellation will likely end up being highly counterproductive. Lastly, I think that in many cases, when confronted with a solvable engineering problem, Constellation has instead decided to kludge around the problem instead of properly solving it.

There are plenty of other issues I could've raised, but I figured these were some of the more obvious ones that I felt needed discussion.

It's The Journey That Matters, Not The Destination

The story broke yesterday that a group of scientists, astronauts, and other space enthusiasts is going to be meeting at Stanford next month to discuss an alternative to the Vision for Space Exploration. Clark and several others have already commented, but I figured I ought to throw in my two cents.

Basically, I'm skeptical.

While there are some good things in the plan, such as supposedly more commercial involvement, and destinations that tap better into some of the supposedly more pressing space-related concerns of the US populace (ie planetary defense against near-earth objects), there's still a lot to be concerned about.

Are we going to see a repeat of what happened with the VSE, where there were all sorts of wonderful platitudes about commercial involvement at the start, that end up being effectively nothing in the end? I mean, COTS is great and all, but NASA spending $10B on its own in-house solution (that's going to end up competing with COTS for ISS cargo/crew delivery when Ares V never gets built), while giving only $500M for more commercial approaches is not what we were led to believe back in the early days of the VSE. Once NASA gets its hands on this new plan, how much commercial content will really survive? If the only commercial involvement ends up being renting an extra Bigelow module or two, it won't be a complete waste, but that's not saying much.

At least from what I've seen, they still are talking about "giving America the Shaft", and wasting countless billions on Ares V, and EDS. If they do that, they're still going to have all the extremely expensive shuttle infrastructure that will have to get paid for every year. Sure, they'll save a little on the edges by not having an LSAM line running, and possibly save a tiny bit by cutting back on the mission tempo (only one manned mission per year or every other year maybe)--though with how much of the money will be going to fixed infrastructure, the savings won't really be that great.

What this new approach probably won't do (any more than what we're getting with the ESAS implementation of the VSE) is actually be relevant to the commercial development of space, or helping our civilization become a truly spacefaring one.

I guess people just get way too hung up on the destinations. Quite frankly, where NASA goes over the next 20 years is of almost trivial importance compared to how it goes there. For all I care, they could set their sites on performing manned exploration of Europa, just so long as they do it in a way that actually helps promote the development of the infrastructure we need to become a truly spacefaring society.

I know I keep hitting on these concepts over and over again, but that's because while the meme is spreading, it still hasn't really sunk in among those in power. There's nowhere in the solar system that's of such pressing importance as to justify a NASA designed and operated transportation system.

On the flip side, almost anywhere in the solar system is a good enough destination if NASA were to go with a truly commercial transportation system. One using commercial propellant depots in orbit that buy propellants from whoever can launch it cheapest, and sell it to whoever wants to move something around in space (both NASA, commercial entities, and other governments). One where NASA "astronauts" are passengers flying on commercial vehicles alongside cosmonauts, taikonauts, UKnauts, Koreanauts, ESAnauts, private (or government) customers going to Bigelow stations or on CSI or Space Adventure operated trips around the moon. One where NASA only builds and operates the actual spacecraft, not the launch vehicles. Because if NASA helps build up a commercial industry like that, we'll end up getting not just whatever the destination de jour is, but everywhere else as well. Maybe NASA ends up spending most of its resources focused on putting boots on Mars, but with a propellant depot on orbit, and NASA acting as an anchor tenant with enough demand to help close the business cases for future RLVs, you're going to see space travel cheap enough that a lot more people can get in the game, and a lot more destinations may be visited. While NASA's off planting flags on Mars, some groups will be exploring NEOs, others will be offering tourist trips to and around the Moon, and others might even be building cloud colonies on Venus.

Anyhow, I think you get my point. We'll see what this new group comes up with. They might surprise us, but for now I remain skeptical.

Orbital Access Cat Skinning Methodologies

In order to discuss the business, finance, and policy approaches for creating low cost and reliable space transportation, it helps to have an understanding of the underlying technology, in order to provide context for those discussions. It also happens to be a lot easier for one trained primarily as an engineer (and whose business experience mostly comes from a couple of classes that I was able to sneak in during my formal schooling, listening to people who know more than I do, and a little bit of firsthand experience at the whole entrepreneurism thing) to discuss the technological part of the problem.

Last week, I was asked to do a remote guest lecture for a university course on space development (being run by Dr Livingston). It was somewhat flattering to be grouped in the same category as much more experienced space technologists, pundits, and businessmen such as Dennis Wingo, Michael Kelly, Jeff Foust, and others. As part of the presentation on developing reusable orbital transportation, I discussed a short list of orbital space transportation approaches that I felt were the most promising directions for development.

So, over the next several weeks, I want to take a little bit of time to introduce and discuss some of those proposed approaches for reusable orbital transportation. Now, a lot of this may be a boring rehash for fellow engineers and technologists, but hopefully I can provide some useful discussion for those coming to this industry from non-engineering backgrounds. I'm planning on discussing the basic concept behind each approach, the potential pros and cons, the unknowns that need resolving for said approaches, and some thoughts on incremental development methods for resolving those unknowns. I may also go into some of the other topics I discussed such as my ideas on reusable transportation markets.

My goal is to provide a basic understanding of where we are, what we think some potential solutions might look like, and an understanding of some of the more probable paths that could take us from here to there (technologically). With that information as a background, it will hopefully make it easier to discuss how business, financing, and government policy issues tie in with the technological situation.

Hopefully I'm not biting off more than I can chew.

DIRECT v2.0 and Orbital Propellant Transfer

Several people have already brought up the DIRECT v2.0 architecture paper that was rolled out at AIAA Space 2007 this last week, as well as the snazzy new website that the DIRECT team just launched. I just wanted to give a few of my own thoughts.

First off, I really got a kick out of the "safer, simpler, sooner" subtitle. Isn't it ironic how hollow ATKs claims about the Shaft appear these days. Oh well, there's no idea too stupid for an entrenched bureaucracy to fight for to the bloody end.

Ross, Chuck, the Metschans, Antonio, and the others deserve a good deal of respect for putting together a rather solid case. As I've said in the past, I think having NASA develop any new launch vehicles is a big mistake--launcher development and operations are NASAs core incompetencies after all. However, politics is the art of the attainable, and the DIRECT concept shows how NASA could develop an architecture that is not only more affordable, more robust, and more capable than the planned architecture, but more importantly is a lot more friendly to commercial cooperation. NASA's current concept of commercial and international collaboration--the notion that commercial space entities and foreign countries should eagerly wait with bated breath for the construction of a lunar outpost before any serious involvement--is a sick joke.

I was only very tangentially involved with the DIRECT team's v2.0 development, but I'm glad to see that some of the memes I've been trying to spread took root in their latest development.

The biggest and most important of these improvements over v1.0 revolves around orbital propellant depots. I may sound like a "Jonny-one-note" on this topic, but I'm still convinced that the ability to store and transfer cryogenic propellants on-orbit is one of the key enabling technologies needed for a spacefaring society. Ross and team did a very good job of highlighting how important such technologies can decrease the odds of losing expensive missions, enable a much more capable NASA lunar architecture, and provide a massive increase in demand for commercial launch services.

As I've mentioned many times previously here, with the current architecture, a delay on the Ares I launch will more or less doom the multi-billion dollar hardware already on orbit. The time pressures likely to exist in trying to get off a lunar mission within 14 days of the first launch greatly increase the odds of making fatal mistakes like have been made in the past. Now, it is probably possible to build stages that can last longer on-orbit without excessive boiloff, but by having the ability to "top-off" the tank, this issue completely goes away. At worst delays would necessitate launching some more fuel before leaving.

The ability to "top-off" the EDS in orbit, or to transfer propellants launched on one launch to the earlier launch can both greatly increase the payload capacity of a 2-launch mission. The problem with doing a 2-launch mission without propellant transfer is that it's very difficult to evenly divide a lunar mission into two roughly identically sized launches. One of the two launchers will end up launching substantially lighter. But if you can transfer propellants, you can now pretty much divide the payload evenly, because you have an infinitely divisible medium that can be transfered back and forth as needed. More importantly, with propellant transfer and dry-launch techniques, a single Jupiter-232 mission could perform the same mission as a much more expensive Ares-1/Ares-V combo.

On a related note, by having propellant transfer capabilities and infrastructure in both LEO and L1/LUNO, several design decisions can be revisited. Right now, with the fragile, no-orbital-infrastructure approach taken in ESAS, if the CEVs engines don't light for the Trans-Earth-Injection burn, the crew is probably dead. Even with an ISS-like base on the surface, unless they have a bunch of backup vehicles, there's very little chance of a successful rescue mission being mounted in-time. Issues like this are part of what drove the CEV back to using hypergols instead of higher performance cryogenic combinations. Once you have some infrastructure in space, such issues become inconveniences instead of fatal mishaps. If your engine doesn't light, you just redock with the L1 node, and wait for a rescue, or possibly try to effect a repair. Or maybe you could transfer propellant back to the lunar lander and head back for the surface, etc.

The most important benefit of the latest DIRECT architecture is the development of a potentially massive new LEO launch market. As I see it, there really are only two major potential markets out there for LEO delivery services that actually have the potential to generate demand for the dozens to hundreds of flights per year that would enable RLVs to really shine--personal spaceflight and propellant deliveries. And by designing a NASA architecture that intentionally takes advantage of such developments to the maximum extent possible, NASA could really help promote and catalyze the development of a robust commercial LEO launch industry. As the Centaur team pointed out over a year ago, even 2-4 moon missions per year would provide a several-fold increase in the demand for commercial earth to orbit launch services. And because propellants are even more finely divisible than people are, such a market could be very helpful for early orbital RLV operators.

But beyond the NASA demand for propellants, having NASA as an anchor tenant could be very useful for making propellant depots a reality sooner rather than later. As I've discussed in previous posts, propellant depots suffer from a chicken and egg kind of problem. Nobody is going to want to privately fund a depot before there are customers for such a depot, and nobody is going to want to fund businesses can act as customers for depots until the depots exist. It might be possible to break this chicken and egg problem without NASAs help by either finding a way to get a minimalist depot built for the low enough cost that someone would be willing to take the risk, or by trying to codevelop the depot and one of its potential customers...but both of those approaches are very uncertain from a business and a financing standpoint.

With NASA as an anchor tenant however, it becomes a lot easier for other businesses to then spring up that can take advantage of the new capabilities. Businesses such as cislunar tourism, or possibly changing the way upper stages are done today. For instance, a Falcon I upper stage refueled in LEO could deliver its full payload to GEO or LUNO, or even interplanetary trajectories. In fact, a Falcon I refueled in LEO could provide almost half the GEO capability of an Atlas V 401 (for a tiny fraction of the price). A Centaur stage refueled in LEO could put a Sundancer sized module into Lunar Orbit, etc.

But some have expressed concern about the idea of putting "risky technologies" on the critical path for NASA's return to the moon. They seem to believe that it would be best to take the lowest technical risk approach from the start, and then only add on things like propellant depots as after-the-fact performance enhancements. I think this view is shortsighted for several reasons, but first I'd like to draw an analogy. Back in the early Apollo days, there was a big debate over the mission architecture. One of the mission architectures that had a lot of favor originally was the "direct ascent" architecture. That architecture avoided the need for orbital rendezvous (which at that point was just as unproven and risky as propellant transfer is today), but at the cost of requiring a much larger NASA developed vehicle (NOVA). Had NASA not taken the smart move of putting "risky unproven technologies" like orbital rendezvous on their critical path, the Apollo program probably would've failed. As CFE points out in his latest blog post, if the Apollo program had taken the further technical risk of developing EOR technologies such as propellant transfer, they might have even been able to avoid the program cancellation that came from trying to run two very expensive launch vehicles.

If the ESAS architecture, by avoiding "risky unproven technologies" like propellant transfer, was able to provide a basic lunar transportation infrastructure for a couple of billion over a couple of years, it would be one thing. But in spite of avoiding any technology that really has the potential to make ESAS even remotely useful, they're still looking at spending $60-100B and the better part of two decades to develop a bare-bones lunar transportation architecture that's only a little more capable than the one fielded by NASA 40 years ago. What's the point in "avoiding technical risks" if it doesn't actually allow you to do things in a cheaper, quicker, or more sustainable fashion? By taking such a hyperconservative approach, and by abandoning most real new space technology R&D, NASA's setting itself up for stagnation over the next decade or so.

In life, and particularly in engineering, there are some risks that end up being riskier to avoid than to meet head-on and overcome. For NASA, orbital propellant transfer is one of them. So, I applaud the DIRECT team's latest release for its emphasis on this technology that's been neglected for far too long. The rest of the report is pretty good too...

I For One Welcome Our New, Scaly Overlords...

Well, it looks like Rand and Clark and Jeff are too busy blogging about the New Space conference to start synthesizing things yet, so I'll just make some comments on the big news from yesterday. In case you don't read Space Transport News every morning like most of the rest of us, it was announced yesterday that Northrop Grumman is buying out Scaled Composites. Unbeknownst to much of the alt.space world, Northrop has actually owned 40% of Scaled for some time now, possibly several years, so this move isn't quite as surprising to me as to some others.

Now, while some of the comments I've seen about the acquisition seem to "get it" (particularly comments from Nathan and Ferris over on Hobbyspace, and surprisingly enough, Mark Whittington as well), there still seems to be a lot of people who are worried that this will become a case of a "big dinosaur company gobbling up a plucky alt.space mammal." On the contrary, I would argue that not only is this acquisition likely to be a net win for Scaled, but in fact it may be one of the most important events this year for the future of commercial space development. Here's some thoughts on why:

Northrop's Skunkworks
First off, lets talk about why this particular deal is likely going to be win-win for both Northrop Grumman and Scaled Composites. Unlike Lockheed Martin, who has Skunk Works, and Boeing that has Phantom Works, Northrop Grumman really doesn't have an lean-and-mean R&D shop of the same caliber. Scaled comes with a reputation in that area that compares well with Northrop Grumman's competitors' secret projects shops, has the capability of doing important work very quietly, and has a longstanding relationship with Northrop.

With the size of Scaled's existing revenue streams, I wouldn't be surprised if the buyout was worth over $100M. Northrop isn't about to screw with a system that works so well that it's worth that kind of money, especially with how much Northrop would benefit from continuing to run Scaled the way it has been run.

The reality of Scaled is that Burt Rutan is eventually going to retire. Using Esther Dyson's meme of startups being either "toys" or "children", it is apparent that Burt is smart enough to realize that if he runs Scaled like his own personal toy, it won't outlast him. He's taking the probably painful step of letting his child grow up. By taking steps now, there's a good chance that Scaled will continue on long past his retirement as one of the world's premier aviation prototype shops.

I'm sure having a huge infusion of capital won't hurt Burt's aviation or space projects very much either.

Now, there are some real risks involved in such an acquisition process. Things don't always go smoothly, and there are bound to be some clashes of corporate culture even if Northrop tries to take a very liberal approach with Scaled. Things may yet get botched, but if they do, it will be because the execution was botched, not that the deal was a bad idea from the start.

Selling out to "The Man"
One of the comments I've seen many make is that Northrop is just buying Scaled to squash the competition. This meme of big, bad dinosaurs trying to maliciously destroy their mammalian competition needs to die. But this meme is even sillier in this particular case. I mean, what business exactly is Northrop supposed to be protecting by squashing Scaled? In fact, if we're talking about manned suborbital flight, none of the dinosaurs really have much to lose, because none of them are involved in that market.

More to the point, I'm not sure I'd even be worried about things if Boeing or Lockheed were the ones doing the acquisition. There may have been a time in the past where it was in the economic self-interest of some of the "dinosaurs" to squish their "mammal" competitors, but if there ever actually was such a time in the past, it doesn't appear to be the case any more. I mean, it should be an eye opener when the head of Exploration Systems for a dinosaur company is singing the praises of a launch vehicle being developed by one of their competitors. More to the point, and I think this is going to be a theme to be developed over the course of many blog posts in the future, I think that most of the big aerospace companies are starting to see New Space companies not as threats to be beaten, but as opportunities for collaboration. I truly believe that we'll see many examples over the next decade of alt.space and big.space companies working together to achieve things that would've been impossible to achieve alone. Heck, even some small parts of NASA are showing some positive trends in that regard.

Once again, the caveat has to be said that sometimes mammals can be squished accidentally even when the dinosaurs are trying to play nice with them. When you have firms of drastically different size working together like that, things have to be thought through carefully, because there are many ways the collaboration can be screwed up. But even with that caveat, I think that more often then not it is worth the risks to both sides to try and collaborate where common ground can be found.

But more on that at a future date.

Liquidity Events and "The Netscape Moment"
The last point I want to make about this deal, and the one that I think will be by far its most important impact, is what it means for investment in this industry. Investors typically don't risk large amounts of money investing in startups with the intention to just hold the resulting stock indefinitely. As one investor put it, if they wanted dividends, they'd buy utilities, not invest in startups. What investors want is a realistic exit strategy--basically an exit strategy is some way that down the road they can get their money back out with a severalfold increase. Since most of these startups are privately held companies, in order for investors to be able to "exit", there has to be some sort of "liquidity event." Due to both SEC restrictions, and the typical form of resulting stock agreements for privately held companies, it is very hard to actually sell stock held in a privately held company. In order to easily convert that stock back into liquid assets, the easiest way is if the company's stock becomes public. Which leads to the two main types of liquidity events that I've heard discussed for alt.space type companies: acquisitions by publicly held companies, and IPOs. Acquisitions being by far the most likely type of liquidity event for most alt.space companies.

Basically, as I understand it, when a private company gets bought out by a publicly traded company, the publicly traded company will usually buy the startup out using stock instead of cash. If an investor owns 10% of the privately held company after money, he'd get 10% of the stock in the public company doing the acquisition. That investor can then turn around and sell those stock to get his money back out to reinvest in other projects. [Note: if Steven or any other of the more investment savvy people are reading this and would like to provide clarification, I'd love to have your comments].

What this transaction shows investors is that there really is a realistic exit strategy for successful alt.space firms. When investors start realizing that they can put money into a promising alt.space startup, and that if all goes reasonably well the company has a good chance of getting bought up by a big, publicly traded aerospace company a few years down the road, you'll start seeing more investors willing to make the plunge. When people start seeing that it really is possible for them to turn a small fortune into a bigger one in this industry (instead of the other way around as the joke usually goes), you'll start seeing a lot more of them becoming interested. As it is, without valid examples of good exit strategies in and industry, its hard to attract much investment even if you have a rock solid business case and a top-notch team.

Now, I think this particular deal isn't like our industry's "Netscape Moment", I think we're definitely getting closer. I also doubt that this acquisition is going to lead in the immediate near term to wholesale buyouts of alt.space companies by big.space companies. However, I wouldn't be surprised to find out several years down the road that this event led to several big.space companies starting to make small strategic investments in the more promising alt.space companies, opening the door for future acquisitions.

So, if a couple of months or years down the road you hear about XCOR or Masten or Armadillo or even SpaceX "selling out to The Man", it might be worth reserving judgment for a while. You never know what might come of it.